Nashville Predators » Peter Nedvedhttp://blogs.tennessean.com/predators
The TennesseanSun, 16 Mar 2014 15:30:03 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6Lockout reading recommendationhttp://blogs.tennessean.com/predators/2012/11/26/lockout-reading-rec-breakaway-by-tal-pinchevsky/
http://blogs.tennessean.com/predators/2012/11/26/lockout-reading-rec-breakaway-by-tal-pinchevsky/#commentsMon, 26 Nov 2012 17:19:19 +0000JOSH COOPER, The Tennesseanhttp://blogs.tennessean.com/predators/?p=9421If you miss NHL hockey — as we all do right now — and want to read something sticks-and-pucks related, the book, “Breakaway: From Behind the Iron Curtain to the NHL–The Untold Story of Hockey’s Great Escapes” by Tal Pinchevksy is a good historical narrative on how various players escaped from communism to play on this continent.

The story also has a bit of Predators angle. There is a prominent portion about Nashville scout Vaclav Nedomansky, who was the first player to defect from behind the Iron Curtain — Czechoslovakia — to North America. It also chronicles how Nashville GM David Poile, then with the Washington Capitals, let Michal Pivonka stay in his house after the Czech forward escaped his homeland.

“(Poile) would snicker just a little but thinking about the awkward circumstances that he would be put in with this young Czech kid living in his house who barely speaks any English and is completely unfamiliar with anything: the culture, what it means to have a credit card or the most basic aspects of Western life,” Pinchevsky said. “I think it gave him a much greater understanding of what people behind the Iron Curtain were living like.”

The book looks at other stories, such as those involving the Stastny brothers, the USSR’s famed “Green Unit,” and Petr Nedved.

Said Pinchevsky, “As a little kid you don’t really appreciate what they went through to get there. As I got older and started working as a journalist and covering sports here and there, you hear more and more about these stories, and the more you heard, the more research you did, the more you realized there were more similar stories. I wanted to write a book, and this obviously started to seem like a more and more fascinating topic to cover.”